


An Ode to Ms B

by VillainousQueer



Category: Original Work
Genre: Character Study, Gen, POV Second Person, Writing Exercise, villainousqueer's cw class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:34:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29205216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VillainousQueer/pseuds/VillainousQueer
Summary: From a freewrite assignment where we were told to write about one person in our life, after reading a Major Jackson poem.
Kudos: 2





	An Ode to Ms B

She laughs like a wildfire, like Cruella De Vil, though she is far from Villainous as it is possible to be, a teacher of all ages, a mentor, a custodian of knowledge who will reach up to the high shelves and pull down the _really_ good zoobooks, the ones about the animals that don’t exist anymore, the ones that explain the concepts that you don’t understand are taboo. She doesn’t tell you. She just says, ‘be careful, they aren’t laminated like the others’ and hands them over.

You’ve read all the other ones. You’ve read every book in the little green classroom with the number 4, the little aqua green classroom that smells like good old wooden desks from the seventies in bright orange and harvest gold, the coveted chair that is bigger than everyone else’s, because you are bigger.

She never takes the books away from you, even though you do nothing but read, and she sits and patiently looks over your long division, where you flip the numbers and the steps and can’t seem to straighten them out. The red graph paper makes them dance, and you don’t know to tell her. She helps you anyway, with the test tubes full of glass beads in sky blue for tens and jade green for ones, and, sometimes, ruby red for hundreds. She knows you understand how it works, but writing it down is the problem.

You don’t understand until you leave her presence how unusual it is for anyone to care how exactly you got the math wrong, and where exactly you keep messing it up.

Her handwriting is so beautiful that it makes you toil, though you had to teach yourself to hold the pen, and it hurts, because you hold it too hard, and write with tiny movements of your fingers, rather than properly, with your arm, the way you draw. Her handwriting is all over the classroom, perfect loops and curls and cursive all over the parts of speech cards, all over the ‘ok’ and ‘see me’s on what few bits of schoolwork you manage to turn in, all over the small whiteboard propped up on the shelves that are the front wall of the classroom. You toil, you want handwriting as pretty as hers. You succeed, not knowing you will grow up into a world that no longer values or needs it. A bad man eventually seduces you just by giving you opportunity to send handwritten letters, because he will answer them, and nobody else does.

She laughs like a wildfire, throaty and low and big, and she has a last name like yours, a name that explains that yes, she is loud and big-voiced, and she is the first time you see anyone not ashamed of it. You never tell her she reminds you of Cruella De Vil. Even at eight, you understand nobody would understand it as a compliment.

She is why you like Cruella. Or maybe Cruella is why you like her, you’ve never really figured that out.

Maybe it’s both.


End file.
